The Nutmeg State

Fox 23 wants you to keep an eye on the spice rack this holiday season — not because you could run out of something you need to bake Christmas cookies, but because your kids may be stealing the nutmeg to get themselves baked.

Last week the station breathlessly reported that teens were snorting, eating, and smoking nutmeg for a pungent and powerful high. The evidence of this behavior? They saw some videos on YouTube.

The story is a carbon copy of the vodka eyeballing piece they did in June, except the YouTube clips of kids holding vodka bottles up to their eyes are much funnier.

While not shy about suggesting this is a big and dangerous problem, the station said they couldn’t find a single instance of someone being treated at a local hospital for ingesting nutmeg.

When I worked in TV, it was my job to make sensationalistic promos for news stories. It was sorely disappointing when our news department did well-thought out and reasonable stories about important topics — instead of ridiculous scare pieces about non-issues like nutmeg smoking.

I’m not in favor of irresponsible journalism, it’s just that the crazier the story, the more fun it was to do the promo. And it was easier! I would have had a field day with this nutmeg thing.

But what do I know? Kids do crazy things. My advice is to go home tonight and give them a big hug — and while you’re hugging them see if you smell nutmeg. If you do, for God’s sake, lock that stuff up somewhere safe.

And they wonder why people don’t bother watching the news anymore. The real stories are just things they read in the newspaper and the rest of the half hour (hour? ninety minutes? two hours?) is garbage.

I actually had a friend eat an entire bottle of nutmeg. He described it as a 4 hour high that was okay, followed by 3 days of a feeling of impending doom, 24 of which he spent curled up on the bathroom floor.

On the upper hand, he swears he’ll never eat a full bottle of anything from the spice rack again.